Sean Penn and The Fred Folder

I felt I'd woken up from a dream, seemingly near the hallway to my apartment. I wasn't sure I was awake, but it looked very stable. I was wearing only a shirt and nothing on my lower body.

Walking into my apartment, I saw my roommate and several other people I know were in the kitchen talking. It was a party atmosphere and I was uncomfortable about my state of undress, but reasonably confident that it was a dream. Yet everything looked right, things were solid, and nothing seemed awry. When I got to my room and turned on the computer, however, the screen was some odd operating system I'd never seen before.

On the screen was an alert message about wanting to play a media file, but had to download a patch. Though the OS was odd and graphical, it flipped into a text mode to do this patch and gave me a box for entering a password. I debated entering my machine password but decided not to... so I just hit "Enter" in the password slot. This caused it to pop up a box saying that I had several choices for how the program would react, one of which was just to stop.

Some people came in, one of whom looked a bit like a younger Sean Penn. They watched as I picked items up and tapped on them, like the rumpled sheets on my bed or the guitar in its case.

me: "I don't get it. How can a dream be made such a precisely real recreation of my room... except with a different computer operating system? These objects are all solid."

The guy who looked like Sean Penn grabbed me and sort of swayed me back and forth.

young man: "You mean like this? Sure, anything's possible... solidity, fluidity. These objects are here because there are agreements. We agree for them to be here, and so they are."

Some colored folders began appearing on the bed... bright red, yellow, blue, and green. It looked like the red folders had labels. From a distance I could read a covered "FR" on one of the reds.

me: "Does that folder say 'FRIEND'?"

young man: "No, it says FRED."

I picked up the Fred folder and flipped it open. It contained a dense packet of photocopied black and white pages that had been bound or stapled together. He looked amusedly at the pile.

young man: "Well, this is one way of getting things done, I guess. Very...physical. But hey, it might be the right way to do it in some case."

He and the people in the room were suddenly covered in colored square post-its. I still had the idea stuck in my head that the colors had something to do with who was a friendly or hostile force. But each person was covered with a lot of different colored post-its, not just one. The colors were very pure red, yellow, green, and blue.

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The accounts written here are as true as I can manage. While the
words are my own, they are not independent creative works of fiction
—in any intentional way. Thus I do not consider the material to
be protected by anything, other than that you'd have to be
crazy to want to try and use it for genuine purposes (much less
disingenuous ones!) But who's to say?